Disney Is One Step Closer to Broadway : Stage: After setting records during trial run of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ in Houston, all eyes are on April debut in New York.

After 50 performances here in six weeks, “Beauty and the Beast” is headed for Broadway in a caravan of 28 equipment trucks. Walt Disney Co. can only hope that sellout audiences will follow when its stage adaptation of the classic story opens in late April.

The show has the markings of a winner. It grossed a record $4.7 million during its tryout run and was extended after 10,117 tickets were sold in one day. That’s second only to first-day sales of “Phantom of the Opera” tickets in New York, said Frank Young, executive director of Theatre Under the Stars, the musical theater company that collaborated with Disney.

Still, Disney executives acknowledge that Broadway success is hardly assured as they embark on their first foray into New York theater, which is a notoriously difficult and expensive environment.

“It’s hard to know how the New York audiences will respond,” said Disney Studios Chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg. “Having seen how they responded (in Houston) I guess has raised our hopes.

Houston offered Disney a chance to test the show away from media centers and the critics who can close a show in a night. It was chosen after the 25-year-old Theatre Under the Stars teamed with the Texas governor, Houston’s mayor and local businesses to persuade Disney to bring the show to town. “We compared it to trying to get the Republican Convention here,” Young said.

Other cities Disney considered include Los Angeles, Montreal and Minneapolis.

While the Burbank-based company will not discuss production costs for the show, they are rumored to have run as high as $10 million. Young said that Theatre Under the Stars contributed $1.5 million in Houston, with Disney providing the rest.

One of the lessons the company learned here is the value of aggressive marketing. Aside from the usual advertising, Walt Disney Co. Chairman Michael D. Eisner joined Houston sports and news figures to read from some of 1,500 books the company donated to disadvantaged children, and a local station aired an hourlong prime-time feature about the show on opening night.

Executives in New York hinted that similar tactics will be employed there.

If the New York reception echoes the Houston response, Disney could mount other theatrical projects. It recently announced plans to lease a Broadway-area theater, though not for “Beauty and the Beast.”

Katzenberg said it is “premature to speculate what the next move is other than if we have just some success in this, that obviously would encourage us to keep going. . . . We have spent time and resources looking at some possibilities for future productions, but we have not committed.”

Disney may also be hard-pressed to find many projects as promising as “Beauty and the Beast,” a classic romantic tale with several memorable songs. The animated feature has grossed almost $350 million theatrically worldwide. Aside from that, Disney has made as much as a $200-million profit so far from the domestic sale of about 22 million videocassettes.

Eisner said that “Beauty and the Beast” seemed to be a perfect live vehicle for the Broadway-type stage.

Disney drew from its theme park experience when launching its Theatrical Productions unit last year. The producer, director, scene designer and choreographer for the stage version of “Beauty and the Beast” all worked on live entertainment shows at Disney theme parks.

The mythology of the show was slightly altered because, producer Robert McTyre noted, “you can’t do everything on stage that you can do in animation.”

If Disney mounts other stage productions, it will probably test them as it did “Beauty and the Beast” in Houston.

“We’re like athletes,” Eisner said. “If we have good luck and win the game, we won’t change our sweat socks.”